Quake Claims Richter Mementoes : Damage: Personal possessions of the co-inventor of the seismic scale were burned in a fire started after temblor hit his nephew’s home.

Charles F. Richter, whose name was once synonymous with Southern California earthquakes, was one of the victims of the Northridge quake, eight years after his death.

A fire triggered by the earthquake burned down a Granada Hills home where hundreds of Richter’s personal belongings were stored, including books, home movies and diaries kept by the co-inventor of the earthquake measuring system.

The home--which belonged to Richter’s nephew, Bruce Walport--was destroyed minutes after the Jan. 17 quake when the house next door caught fire and the flames quickly spread, sending Walport, his wife and 10-year-old son fleeing into the street. Although Richter’s scientific legacy went to Caltech, the 61-year-old Walport had inherited many of his uncle’s personal possessions after Richter’s death in September, 1985.

“It’s devastating,” said Walport, a retired heavy equipment operator who watched his home--and the inheritance--burn. “I just feel terrible that we lost all his stuff.”

Richter, along with Caltech colleague Beno Gutenberg, devised a standardized system for measuring earthquake magnitude in the early 1930s. In the years that followed, Richter catalogued the temblors that struck Southern California, creating an important foundation for modern seismic studies, though the famous Richter scale is no longer used in most current news reports of earthquakes.

Richter donated more than 30 boxes of his scientific materials to Caltech, including lecture notes, manuscripts, letters, as well as his own poetry and prose. Caltech archivist Judy Goodstein said enough material remains to write a biography of Richter, who earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics there in 1928 and remained on the faculty for his entire career.

Although he was obsessed by earthquakes--he kept a seismograph in the living room of his Altadena home--Richter had a range of other interests, reflected in the book collection inherited by his nephew.

Now, all that remains are the one-half-inch thick bolts that secured the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that once housed Richter’s leather-bound volumes of art, botany, philosophy, poetry and science. Each had been marked in Richter’s messy but legible scrawl, “C.F. Richter,” Walport said. Lost with them was Richter’s stamp collection, which he had started as a boy, his nephew said.

Walport said that as a child he was regular guest at his aunt and uncle’s home, where the books were a prominent feature, filling every wall that did not have a window or a door, Walport said.

“I perused through some of the books but I never really read them; they were way over my head,” said Walport, who graduated from Van Nuys High School but did not attend college.

Walport had also kept Richter’s custom-built cherrywood desk. After it was delivered, he discovered it contained two volumes of Richter’s diaries, spanning the 1920s to the mid-1950s. Walport said one entry was an account of Richter’s meeting physicist Albert Einstein, who visited Caltech three times in the early 1930s.

The fire, then the rain, turned the diaries and other books to dust and mud.

Also lost were about 3,000 feet of home movies that included footage of Richter and his wife, Lillian, hiking in the nude. “They were nudists and especially liked to walk naked,” Walport said.

Richter was an avid backpacker who spent vacations in California’s Sierra Nevada. On weekends, the Richters often took Walport and his sister for walks through Huntington Gardens in San Marino and nearby Descanso Gardens.

Despite the time they spent together, not much of Richter’s interest in science rubbed off, Walport said. Richter could always beat him in checkers, “but I could beat him arm-wrestling,” he said.

While Richter measured the movements of the earth, Walport has spent much of his life moving it--operating earthmovers, including the monstrous, two-engined 657 Caterpillar Scraper: “He always told me to study hard but I was cut from a different mold.”

He nonetheless stayed close to his uncle--who was related by marriage--even though Richter sometimes grew annoyed with Walport’s children, whose rambunctious play would disrupt his living room seismograph.

Those and other memories make the loss of his effects especially sad, said Walport, who has rented a house in Panorama City while deciding whether to rebuild on his property. On Thursday, he surveyed the ruins with his insurance agent.

Although his home policy covers replacement of his house after the fire, Walport said he was uncertain whether he can collect anything for the loss of his uncle’s collection because he never had it appraised.

“We’ve always been prepared for an earthquake because of him,” Walport said. “We had water and food, a trailer out back we could have stayed in. I’ve had earthquake insurance for years. But we didn’t expect a fire to burn it all down.”